


marionette

by hikaie



Series: 31 Days of Apex [1]
Category: Apex Legends (Video Games)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Temporary Character Death, Character Study, Drabble, Gen, Identity Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:42:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25150339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hikaie/pseuds/hikaie
Summary: an introspective on sensation, or,Revenant is quite literally on top of the world, and then, he isn't.
Series: 31 Days of Apex [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1821931
Kudos: 11





	marionette

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, I'm starting this late and I might bleed over into next month. Gonna be doing double prompts for this, and I'm going to be doing one for each character and then we'll see what the extra get me. Hope y'all like overblown Frankenstein allegories. Enjoy.
> 
> **Days 1 & 2: Memory; Blood**

He is far above the city, the air thin, with glitz above and below and around and smoke pouring from the yawning building. He is wrapping tender fleshy fingers around glass that is not quite cold, not quite sharp- it doesn’t occur to him, then, hasn’t yet, but soon- and jerks it from his neck. It’s… a poor decision, by all accounts. All his training is a sharp, militant voice in his head asking _why_ he’d remove a penetrating object, but then he’s short circuiting. It is not in that humanly-overplayed idea of the brain chugging, bereft at its own insignificance, but a true overload of electricity when two pieces of conflicting wire are yanked into contact.

And then he is not a thousand feet above a world of glamour. He’s fifty feet underwater, reaching for translucent blue-pink ice while his brain tells his inhuman skeleton that he’s running out of oxygen he does not need. He’s being sucked out the side of a transport at cruising altitude, eardrums blowing and eyeballs welling and bulging at the pressure; atmosphere whistles past his ears. He is on a floor, and it could be anywhere, but what does it matter when his lungs are filling with fluid, with his own blood, while he chokes and whimpers and thrashes, still fighting to the last?

Further back: he is still human. Mostly; a flesh-and-metal monstrosity pieced together time and again. He is not Frankenstein’s monster. That would require a sort of care into the pieces they retain or replace, a sort of reverence for the art. He stops tasting blood, at some point, because they remove his tongue, even though it was fully functional. He just doesn’t need it. He is a weapon. And unlike that wretched beast, he does not have the free will to question his creators.

Still, his brain can sometimes conjure the bitter copper flavor, like when the glass comes free. Where would it come from? The jugular he does not have? Dripping from cuts on hands no longer encased in skin? His reflection is shattered into millions of half-pieces and glimpses in glass that comes down in a glittering rain every time he plows his fists into it. Within the skyscraper alarms are still blaring. He can hear flames crackling ever more intense, overcoming the sound of metal on glass as he finally calms as much as he’s able to. It is then, in those briefest of moments, which he comes to a decision. (It will still haunt him much later, in a deep, locked away part of him how fast he came to it; with the speed of a machine.)

The monster had it all wrong, he figures. There is no peace in loving, in having something. There is certainly no sense in grieving that which took everything from you, just to cling onto a misguided sense of _humanity_. Revenant sees with a clarity that he has been robbed of for so long- he has no delusions of amity, of _living_. Only vengeance lies this way, and he has walked on a parallel road of violence for so long at his handlers’ direction that it’s almost _too easy_.

He walks off the beaten path, and he does not look back.


End file.
